• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  exporting widescreen distorts the video

  Posted by Ssskinner on May 7, 2007 at 8:37 pm

  I captured a anamorphic widescreen clip from my camera and cut the footage into a widescreen sequence. This looks very good when I export it at its normal settings on FCP (720×480), but the file is a gig large at 4 1/2 minutes. I need to upload it to youtube, which only allows sizes up to 100 megs.

  When I try exporting it at a smaller size (360×240), it becomes distorted and stretched, with no black bars. I’ve tried using different sizes, different encodings, and pretty much everything I can think of.

  What I want to know: why is it not coming out in the same aspect since the size is just a half in the same aspect? I also just tried dragging the sequence into a new sequence and distorting the aspect ration in the motion tab, but I’m sure there has to be a better way!

  Thanks in advance if someone can help me. I’m willing to answer any questions where I haven’t been clear!

  David Smith replied 19 years ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  David Smith

  May 8, 2007 at 10:21 pm

  I don’t think youtube corrects for anamorphic footage, so you’ll have to letterbox it first.

  I’ve recently put some letterboxed material up there like this:

  edited anamorphic sequence.
  dropped the edited sequence into a non anamorphic sequence. FCP letterboxes it.
  render
  export a reference movie of the 4:3 letterbox sequence
  import ref. movie into Compressor
  in Compressor I kept the codec the same, but scaled the video to 320×240
  changed frame rate from 29.97 to 30 (that’s what youtube wants)
  also changed the audio to mp3, mono, 22.050 KHz (also what they want)

  You can upload the resulting file, but they will recompress it to flash, which is the codec they use. I believe it was Shane Ross (thank you!) who pointed out recently that if you encode a flash 7, Sorenson Spark file with the above settings, they don’t recompress. So I imported the file into Flash Video Encoder, compressed with those settings, and uploaded the resulting .flv file, which is 7′ 42″ long, and 25MB in size.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqVMz9WR38

  I’ve also tried scaling files when exporting from FCP, and scaling them with the Flash Encoder. The Compressor method was MUCH faster.

  Regards,
  David

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up